From Dying Stars to the Birth of Life

With the beginning of the new 21st century, mankind is ¬finally close to being able to answer the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe. The rise of computers and rocket science in the last half of the 20th century allowed scientists to make two amazing discoveries that indicated life may be widespread throughout our universe. In the1970s, life scientists started ¬finding small bacterial-like creatures living on our planet in extreme hostile environments that everyone believed should instantly kill any living things. Some of these life-forms lived in hot or boiling water that was extremely salty, acidic, or alkaline. A few made their homes inside icebergs, while others lived inside rocks located miles below ground, or even on the power rods of nuclear power plants. These fi¬ndings challenged science’s long held belief that life is an extremely complicated and fragile process that demands equally complex and fragile environmental conditions. These strange creatures (which scientists call extremophiles or “lovers of extreme environments”) appear to be the direct descendants of the earliest life-forms that evolved on earth almost four billion years ago when our world was extremely hot and believed to be totally incompatible with any kind of life. Scientists suddenly realized that life may be far more resilient, flexible, and adaptable than previously believed possible and might easily evolve on other worlds that have environmental conditions that are very different from those found on earth. Then, in the 1990s, astronomers began discovering that “homes” for alien or extraterrestrial life might also be very common in the universe. Powerful new ground-based and space telescopes have confi¬rmed that our sun is only one of innumerable stars in our galaxy that has planets circling it. Many scientists now believe that de¬finitive evidence of extraterrestrial life will be found well before the end of the 21st century.